From the RFS entry on Surinam, position 22: "“public expression of hatred” towards the government is punishable by up to seven years in prison under a draconian defamation law. The controversial Dési Bouterse, who became president again in 2010 in an election, has managed to be amnestied for the 1982 murders of 15 political opponents including five journalists."
RFS on Jamaica at 10: " The very occasional physical attacks on journalists must be offset against this, but no serious act of violence or threat to media freedom has been reported since February 2009, a month that saw two cases of abuse of authority by the Kingston police."
Or even Ireland at 9: "... defamation lawsuits are common. Finally, interviewing police sources has been virtually impossible since the Garda Siochana Act of 2005, which bans police officers from talking to journalists without prior authorization."
Not a little biased are we? Amnesty for murdering journalists isnt my idea of freedom of the press, nor are defamation law suits, or a prohibition against interviewing the police.
Defamation law suits are important for curtailing shock-jock journalism, without them journalists are ultimately free to lie about someone and report it as fact.
You're misrepresenting the reality on the ground in Germany. The government has zero interest in prosecuting the man, but had to when a foreign head of state pointed out a law that was on German books outlawed what the man said. They cannot choose to apply laws selectively so he will probably be prosecuted, acquitted and later the law will be struck down. It's worth mentioning that Germany really needs Erdogan to remain well disposed to them so that was an incentive too.
When the law in question only allows prosecution with the consent of elected officials (which is not the case for other crimes), your rationalization falls flat on its face. Perhaps it is you who is misrepresenting reality.
Also, caving on free speech for international political reasons is still caving on free speech. Protecting people from such political calculations is the whole point of constitutional guarantees of free speech in the first place.
The law regarding insulting foreign heads of states is an interesting one, as is the handling of it.
That law explicitly (and untypically) states that the executive has to decide that the district attorney may press charges, which was granted in this case.
The law is stated as "the executive needs to authorise prosecution", but due to how it's structured (executive reigning in to a matter of court) it's really more of a veto. (http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_stg... - section 104a is about the veto)
1. The executive (through Merkel) allowed the use of the law in this instance.
At the same time, there's consensus within the executive and most of the legislative that the law should be repealed.
2. The jurisprudence opens the case, it drags on for a year. (or they decide not to take on the case, in which case everything stops here)
3. There's a verdict. Boehmermann can appeal several times, dragging this on for another 4 years or so.
4. At some point the law gets repealed.
5. The next time a court hears the case, they'll kick it out because there's no law and therefore there can be no prosecution.
An alternative reality might be:
1. The executive stopped prosecution under this law because they can.
2. We'd hear about how the German government stepped in on matters of jurisprudence every. single. time. that Germany complains about overreach and a lack of rule of law in Turkey (and probably elsewhere). A gift that keeps on giving.
Then there's also the more general defamation law (applicable to everybody and with no executive veto clause). Due to where the TV station is headquartered, the case is handled in Mainz. For those defamation cases, the Mainz district attorney has a rule that a mandatory mediation meeting must happen in person in Mainz, with no exceptions.
Not sure mediation is something Erdogan really wants to do for what is essentially a populist stunt.
That is absurd; prosecutions decline to pursue cases all the time.
Look at the enormous change in U.S. police prosecutions in the last couple of years due to public pressure. I seriously doubt the amount of misconduct drastically increased.
They're both representative forms of government with adversarial systems of law.
Though CaptainZapp's reply was low-signal, snarky, and redundant with her/his down vote, it did inspire me to learn more about German law.
It appears that by statute, German prosecutors have little discretion when it comes to pursuing convictable cases. They may only nonprosecute minor offenses, i.e. those with sentences of less than one year. However, there are exceptions that are applied by prosecutors that could apply to this case. One is the "serves the public interest" exception; another is the "may damage state interests" exception. Either way, the answer isn't cut and dry and contains way more nuance than my original comment and its reply suggest.
coming in at #22 is Surinam with a "“public expression of hatred” towards the government is punishable by up to seven years in prison under a draconian defamation law."
The ranking for Slovakia at 12 seems at odds with its description "Defamation is punishable by up to eight years in prison, the harshest penalty for this offence in the European Union. Many legal actions have been brought by businessmen, politicians and judicial officials. Prime Minister Robert Fico initiated several during his first term. Censorship was tightened in 2014 by the adoption of a regulation limiting the number of journalists with parliamentary accreditation, restricting their movements within the parliament and banning them from photographing the personal property of parliamentarians."
I personally won't read to much into this, RFS has a very single minded political agenda, Mongolia has more press freedom than Japan and Italy, Georgia (in which the government closes TV stations at will) has more freedom than Greece, and Lebanon's press has apparently more freedom than Israel's.
Their methodology is stated very explicitly. They do a questionnaire in all of the relevant countries and have a formula to derive the scores.
You cannot begin with an intuitive notion of the countries that you want to have a high "press freedom" index and when the actual scores don't match your intuition blame it on the assumed bias of the source.
I'm certainly open to the idea that this report is crap, but they have data, numbers, a sample, formulas, and reasoning and arguments for why they did things the way they did. If you think they are incorrect, explain why, don't just say "this doesn't fit my preconceived notions about the countries I want to believe are more free, so the people who did it are lying".
For example, I'm not at all shocked that they rated Lebanon as having higher press freedom than Israel, in fact that's probably to me an indicator that they are doing something right and not just picking out statistical proxies for western european-style nations.
Not buying it sorry.
I've read the report every year and they don't publish their aggregated data.
The questionnaires are filled by local representatives of their choosing.
They had have made political moves which go against their own statements and condemnations and they have quite a few very weird picks that don't even seem to correspond to their own summary of the country.
And while it's true that I can't hold an intuitive understanding of the freedom of the press in various countries I can some how understand that countries where the government shuts down TV stations and news papers all day long probably have less freedom than countries where "organized crime" harasses Journalists.
Okay, I'd buy that the targets of the survey may very well be pre-selected to align politically with a particular set of positions.
What do you mean by aggregated data? I'm fairly well trained in mathematics and statistics but I'm not sure what that phrase means -- does it not just mean the statistics derived from the sample?
And doesn't it matter mostly how /the journalists/ feel about how much press freedom they have? Journalists may very well not be effected by overreaching hate crime legislation (journalism rarely involves writing hate speech) though laypeople see it as a violation of freedom of speech. Organized crime may feel more oppressive than certain oppressive governments. And the survey only purports to express the opinions of journalists in many countries about how free they feel they are, it doesn't pretend to solve a centuries old open problem in philosophy and accurately define 'freedom' and then measure it.
Aggregated data means actually publishing the data they've collected not some numbers that may or may not hold any relevance.
For each country they should publish how many questionnaires were issued, who they were issued too (local journalists? foreign journalists?) split abuses to actual abuse of power by the state vs the nature of reporting from conflict zones, and maybe make those filled questionnaires public with or without the actual names?
I think anybody with even a rudimentary exposure to statistics, or survey methodology will tell you that what you said is, quite frankly, not even remotely true.
Even a grad student could present statistics to show whatever they wanted (trust me I've done it...), and you can orient survey questions, or even ask them in a certain order that you will guarantee a certain response.
It's like asking "What are your thoughts on the freedom of press that you enjoy?", versus "How do you feel about your government's attempts to curb press freedom?"
Of course it is true. What you've said is the case about literally every study that has ever been done in a huge number scientific fields.
The fact that you have used statistics to lie does not mean that these people have. They published their questionnaire, you can read it. They published a detailed description of their methods, you can read them. That's the best we can do in science.
It is not only malicious but even worse, lazy, to say "I don't like your results, so your methods must be bad", which is literally all I've seen in this thread. That and "country X doesn't have literally the exact same definition of freedom of speech as the U.S., how could they possibly score high on a press freedom [which is only tangentially related to freedom of speech] index?!?!?! LOL"
> From the RFS entry on Surinam, position 22: "“public expression of hatred” towards the government is punishable by up to seven years in prison under a draconian defamation law. The controversial Dési Bouterse, who became president again in 2010 in an election, has managed to be amnestied for the 1982 murders of 15 political opponents including five journalists."
> RFS on Jamaica at 10: " The very occasional physical attacks on journalists must be offset against this, but no serious act of violence or threat to media freedom has been reported since February 2009, a month that saw two cases of abuse of authority by the Kingston police."
> Or even Ireland at 9: "... defamation lawsuits are common. Finally, interviewing police sources has been virtually impossible since the Garda Siochana Act of 2005, which bans police officers from talking to journalists without prior authorization."
> Not a little biased are we? Amnesty for murdering journalists isnt my idea of freedom of the press, nor are defamation law suits, or a prohibition against interviewing the police.
Whilst everybody loves a good US-bash, if you're actually trying to tell me reporters have it harder there than any of the above, then you are seriously deluding yourself.
You can quote news stories (you will always be able to find an exaggerated sensationalist piece about how terrible things are, no matter the conditions, in any country. I've read plenty of articles on HN for example that describe the U.S. police force as essentially identical to the Stasi) or you can actually ask the reporters in those countries what their experience is. Both are valuable. This survey purports to do the second. Reporters' experience may generally be expressed as relative both to surrounding countries, previous conditions in the same country, and relative to the expectations of the reporters in each country, of course, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't ask them.
If there was a survey of technologists that summarized their opinions on a technical issue, but there were articles about it saying something else, would you say "well, the survey is obviously biased, look at these news articles, they tell us what the facts are no matter what the experts say"? No, you would not. Because it would be disastrously foolish to ignore the opinions of experts who actually work in the field, subjective as they may be.
A free press and whistleblowers are essential to democracy.
Without a free press & whistleblowers democracy cannot function.
It is clear from the last five years of leaks that elected governements around the world feel they must act in secret because they suspect the electorate would not approve.
Without much more oversight this will worsen.
Free Chelsea Manning. Pardon Edward Snowden. Drop the inditement against Julian Assange. Offer sanctuary to Mossack Fonesca's whistleblower. Lead by example.
sigh... this again. He's being downvoted because statements like
> "A free press and whistleblowers are essential to democracy. Without a free press & whistleblowers democracy cannot function."
are applause lights that contribute nothing of substance to this conversation.
Pick a bunch of random people-- hell, even random politicians-- and ask them if a free press is essential to democracy. I guarantee you 100% of them will say yes, and probably 100% of them actually believe it and aren't just cynical liars. This suggests that the causes of this muzzling are deeper than people simply not realizing how important a free press is, and that the solutions are more complex than repeating two-sentence mantras that everyone already agrees with.
Given that the press doesn't have that much freedom in most of the world (even supposedly democratic countries), I think your statement that "everyone already agrees with" these mantras is plainly false.
You're making assumptions. You're assuming that your position is "reasonable", and you're assuming that most people (at least in the western world) agree with you. And then to make your logic work, you're assuming that there's a vast conspiracy to oppress most people to prevent them from having freedom of speech and press.
The reality is that there aren't a lot of places where there's anything close to an absolute freedom of speech or the press. America really sticks out as an anomaly there, by having it written into the constitution. If it were really a strong part of a nation's culture, you'd think this wouldn't be so unusual, but it is, and in fact other western nations have laws completely contrary to this to some degree. Just look at the UK, where the truth is not an absolute defense against libel.
> that contribute nothing of substance to this conversation
What does ignoring the (debatable[1]) bulk of a post - arguing that democracies should support whistleblowers, rather than persecuting them - and simply downvoting because of a repeated platitude, contribute to the conversation?
[1] Unless you think "everyone" believes Manning, Snowden and Assange should be freed/supported.
Manning just did a data dump, damn anyone who was actually in there. From what I understand, there were active agents dossiers in the data Manning released.
That's simply not a responsible whistleblow. Now, turning in bad programs and illegal operations that the US did, IS responsible discourse: Snowden scrubbed for potential people in his leaks. He went for policies and plans and programs, not people.
Didn't the Bush Administration do that very same thing to a CIA operative
It was rumored to be revenge against her husband for holding an opinion contrary to the government. I can't remember the person's name but I do remember it happening.
Isn't it Wikileaks that data dumped, not Manning? I guess you could say Manning is partially responsible by not giving the data to journalists instead? Not really sure.
Wikileaks encrypted the data and were going through it with other journalists to redact info such as agent details.
They requested the White House also vet each article before publication as did Greenwald and Poitras for Snowden - the White House never responded in either case.
Some portion of the raw data leaked by accident when a Guardian Journalist inadvertently published the decryption key.
Remember this was all pre-Snowden and traditional Journalists were playing catchup with the necessary security.
Even so no actual harm has ever been shown.
Claims to the contrary have been made as vague press releases, but no actual harm has ever been shown.
When you surprised by Singapore - I assume you mean how low it is?
I may be able to shed some light here - Singapore is considered a "kindly" dictatorship - basically, the ruling party is efficient and has a historical track record of running things well.
Corruption, in the normal sense is near zero.
So the population is happy to keep the status quo.
However, opposition to the ruling party is next to non-existent (or was before, this may have changed), there is little to no freedom of the press (that includes web blogs), and if you try to challenge the government too loudly, they tend to either jail you or file defamation suits against you which they are guaranteed to win, and bankrupt you.
I think it was William Gibson that described Singapore as "Disneyland with the death penalty" (although this was some time ago).
Hard to believe India is at 133. The kind of manufactured news that is peddled by the Mainstream Media in India with no responsibility, I think it should be #1 !!
Also, going through the methodology, I couldn't figure out which Indian languages are included in the survey, so, its quite possible that a major chunk of the Indian media was left out from the survey just because the translations were only in Hindi (thats my assumption).
Japan is 72nd, and their biggest beef is "記者クラブ" (Journalist Club) were established domestic media gets precedence in press conferences.
It partly looks like political maneuvering to get more question time in them. I wonder how other countries do it. I heard there are "first question rights" and "first rows" in the US also, so old hands like Helen Thomas had advantage.
Finland shouldn't be at the top of the list. There is still self-censorship going on, especially related to opinions about Russia. It's called "Finlandization": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finlandization
What year are you living in? There's certainly some self-censorship in Finnish media, but it's mostly related to PC-issues (e.g. disproportionate amount of of crimes committed by foreigners, and especially some humanitarian immigrants), but that's mostly a political statement by the reporters and certainly not a government policy (and thus does not extend to all of media).
1. Click on the "World Press Freedom Index" link in the first sentence of the article, then click on the "METHODOLOGY" link in the subheader (black and white bar).
RFS on Jamaica at 10: " The very occasional physical attacks on journalists must be offset against this, but no serious act of violence or threat to media freedom has been reported since February 2009, a month that saw two cases of abuse of authority by the Kingston police."
Or even Ireland at 9: "... defamation lawsuits are common. Finally, interviewing police sources has been virtually impossible since the Garda Siochana Act of 2005, which bans police officers from talking to journalists without prior authorization."
Not a little biased are we? Amnesty for murdering journalists isnt my idea of freedom of the press, nor are defamation law suits, or a prohibition against interviewing the police.